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bother you,’ he said; ‘but since you are the only other person in the world who will have this privilege, it is necessary that I should be very thorough. These men are in charge of the guards, and one of them is on duty day and night.’
    She seated herself again with a pleasurable sense of importance.
    ‘May I ask you one question?’ she said.
    He nodded.
    ‘Why have you chosen me? I am not a proficient secretary, and you know nothing whatever about me. I may be an associate of the worst characters.’
    He leant back in a padded chair, surveying her quizzically.
    ‘All that I know about you,’ he said, ‘is that you are the daughter of the Rev. George Marion, a widower, who died seven years ago and left you little more than would carry you to your aunt in London. That you have an uncle in America, who israising a large family and innumerable mortgages in the middle west; that you had a brother who died in childhood; and that you have been engaged by three firms – Meddlesohn, of Eastcheap – you left them because you refused to be party to a gross fraud; Highlaw and Sons, of Moorgate Street – which you left because the firm failed; and Tack and Brighten – which you would have left, anyway.’
    She stared at him in amazement.
    ‘How did you find this out?’
    ‘My dear child,’ he said, rising and laying a fatherly hand upon her shoulder, ‘how does one find things out? By asking the people who know. I take few risks; I came down to Southwark to see you, and if possible to speak to you before I engaged you or you knew that I wanted to engage you. Now!’
    He returned to his desk briskly.
    ‘This is business. You receive fifteen pounds weekly from me and a bonus at the end of every year. Your duty is to act as my confidante, to write letters – not as I shall dictate them, for I hate dictating – but in the sense of my instructions.’
    She nodded.
    ‘There is one other thing,’ he said, and lowered his voice as he leant across the desk. ‘I want you to remember three words.’
    She waited, expecting a conventional little motto which pointed out the way of efficiency.
    ‘Those three words,’ he went on in the same tone, ‘must never be uttered to a living soul whilst I am alive; must be repeated to nobody but myself.’
    Elsie felt incapable of being further amazed than she was. The last twenty-four hours had held, so it seemed to her, the very limit of surprises.
    ‘To my partners, to my friends, or to my enemies – and especially to my enemies,’ he continued with a fleeting smile, ‘you must never employ them – until I am dead. Then, in the presence of the gentlemen who are connected with this corporation you shall say’ – he dropped his voice to a whisper – ‘you shall say, “Kingsway needs Paving.”’
    ‘“Kingsway needs Paving,”’ she repeated in a whisper.
    ‘Whatever happens do not forget those words,’ he said gravely. ‘Repeat them to yourself till you know them as you know your own name.’
    She nodded again. Bewildered as she was, half inclined to laugh, with the old suspicion as to his sanity recurring, she knew that immense issues hung upon those meaningless words – ‘Kingsway needs Paving’.

CHAPTER VII
    At the moment when Elsie was being initiated into the mysteries of King Kerry’s office, two men sat at breakfast in the sumptuous dining room of Mr Leete’s flat in Charles Street.
    One of these was the redoubtable Leete himself, in a dressing-gown of flowered silk, and the other the young-looking Mr Hermann Zeberlieff. He was a man of thirty-eight, but had one of those faces which defy the ravages of time and the consequence of excess.
    Leete and he were friends. They had met in Paris in the days when Millionaire Zeberlieff’s name was in every paper as the man who had cornered wheat.
    They had something in common, these two men, and when a Wall Street syndicate had smashed the corner, ruining hundreds of small speculators, but leaving Hermann